 Basically, in modern philosophy, we treat problems like theodicy, the problem of evil, the divine presence, the question to the degree to which God is in the world, interacts with the world or external transcendent, not involved in worldly activities. And then finally of individual or human responsibility, the question of human autonomy, what is up to us, what can we do for what are we responsible? In other words, the free will question. These three problems we understand to be distinct and they're treated as distinct in modern philosophy. But the Greeks treated these three problems together as a single issue, and this issue was divine care. For them, the question of evil, why do bad things happen to good people, why are there natural disasters, and so forth, was bound up with the question of divine presence. Conversely, divine transcendence, divine withdrawal or absence from the world, and then also divine influence or lack of influence over human actions. This was all bound up in one question. And the topic, the words that the Greeks used to discuss this question was pranoia, which means literally forethought, pro, for, and the noia is thought or thinking. So it's forethought or foremind, but it's also a completely normal colloquial Greek term for caring. So when you read in a Greek text that somebody has pranoia or is exercising pranoia, it means they're planning something, they're caring about something, going to take care of it. And this is why I titled, gave the book this provocative title, Did God Care? Because on the one hand, I wanted to wake people up and say, Hey, here's the big question, right? That so many people have with regards to theological and religious issues. But on the other hand, the question of provenance or pranoia is really about care. It's about, do the gods care? And if so, how do they care? And this was not a minor question. If you look, if you actually read ancient philosophers, what you find is they all agree that the gods care in some way. They disagree as to what this care looks like. It's very rare that philosophers you say, Oh, no, God stays out of it. So pranoia is divine care. And what I wanted to do in this book is look at, well, everything having to do with divine care. The reason I did that is when I was writing my first book, Apocalypse of the Alien God, I was looking at these Gnostic texts from the Nagkamadi Corpus discovered in 1945. And they talk a lot about divine care. Pranoia is really important in Gnostic literature. And I didn't understand this concept. And so I had to go find scholarly literature about it. And there wasn't a lot, actually. There was, there certainly was no book, a pranoia book that told you everything you needed to know about divine care and ancient philosophy. So I thought, well, someone needs to write that book. So Plato, he's not the first Greek writer to talk about pranoia. Like I said, it's a normal Greek word. And there were some early Greek philosophers who talked about divine care here and there. And Herodotus, the historian, is actually the oldest Greek writer on record to connect the word pranoia or care to divine care, divine matters, and care for the cosmos. He's talking about intelligent design. Isn't it nice that things are put together the way they are and the animals are the way they are? Only God could have come up with that, right? Plato, however, is the, as with so many questions, the philosopher who really gets it started, gets it going. And his dialogue, the timeus, which is concerned with cosmogony, or the origin of the cosmos, is the dialogue where he, some of his most important contributions to thinking about divine care take place. What's really special about the timeus is that Plato describes the world as being made by a craftsman. The Greek word here is demiurgos, means a craftsman, somebody engaged in making things out of things, okay? And there are basically three factors at work in the creation of the world. One is the craftsman who is good. Second are the eternal forms, okay, to which he looks in some respect, some manner, as providing a blueprint for him to work with. And then there's what is called the receptacle, the Greek word is hoda, which means space or place, which is, function is not entirely clear, but it seems to be the place that it works and the place that the creation happens. And Plato is sketchy on the details, but there are these three factors of craftsman, the forms, and the choral or receptacle place. And the craftsman, Plato writes, is a good being who wants the world to be as good as it possibly can be, and thus he creates the world with great care. It is with great care that is pranoya that the demiurge made the cosmos. So, why are things not so perfect down here? Is it, what's the cause of that? Did the craftsman have a problem? Was he not capable? Plato gets at this in a number of ways in the timeus. One is, he notes that the receptacle, the place where the creation happens is a source of chaos and disordered movement. And so the things made in it also participate in chaos and disordered movement in one sense. Another thing is what you alluded to already. Plato delegates some of the work, Plato has the demiurge delegates some of the work to beings whom he calls the young gods. These are the gods of traditional Greek mythology, Zeus, Hera, and the rest. And it is to them that Plato gives the task of actually fashioning human beings. Once the craftsman has made the soul of the world, the various celestial spheres, everything that moves in an ordered eternal way, the craftsman makes himself. But the things that need to, that are going to participate in disorder, he leaves that to the young gods. And thus the young gods are also culpable beings in a way. The demiurge then withdraws from the creation, kind of steps back from it. So this is, this is very important for subsequent thought about divine providence, especially among thinkers who privileged the thought of Plato, so called middle or neoplateness later Greek philosophers were really into Plato. So they looked at the timeus as their authoritative text for how the world came about. And what they saw is, there are some beings to whom the creation and administration of things down here in the world, including you and me, people has been delegated. And these, these people are not the highest deity, they're not the craftsman, they're not the first God, nor they forms. No, no, no, they're lower beings. And then second, there is the problem of this origin of chaos or disorder in motion, the, the Chora or receptacle. And later, and already with Aristotle, the receptacle is identified with matter. And so when we get to Roman philosophy, people often see matter as the source of this chaos or disordered motion. I guess, adding on to that question, just kind of comparing, where did the stowa differ from, like you're saying the middle platenist and later neoplatenist and their understanding of providence and God's role in creation. Well, the stowa are interesting in so many ways, and I really the most relevant of the Greek philosophical schools for us in the 21st century. You know, the Stoic philosophers beginning with Zeno, already in the fourth century, then especially precipice, and clientes, they, they don't see the world as being made by a craftsman who is aloof from the world. So, rather, they identify the creative activity with the ongoing flow of the eternal creation that is the world that we inhabit already. So if you're into things like subatomic particles and string theory and looking for a universal fiery substance underlying all things eternally active, this is very opposite to stoic philosophy, stoic physics. The stowa identified providence and fate with one another, and also with the rational principle that organizes everything in the cosmos, the logos. So while Plato describes a craftsman looking at the forms, making things in this chaotic space, and then eventually delegating the lower parts of that creation to younger deities. It's more graded, right? There's a gradation of different beings on different levels. The stowa offer a panentheistic perspective where God is eternally participating in the creation all around us all the time in an active and completely rational way. So instead of being a good intention from God at the beginning of things, providence is a stoic philosophy, a kind of divine fire that we're all experiencing insofar as we're being rational and using our heads at any time. The big one is the eternal return. You got to get that in. Right, always. That's in the providence book. That's into God care because one of the things I looked at is divine foreknowledge. Do the gods know everything? Part of, if you're going to care about something, you have to understand it, or at least be aware of it. And so when ancients asked, if God is transcended, how can he have knowledge of temporal things? And Platinus writes, the one is not aware of what is happening to you and me. Right. The one is not involved. The one is completely insulated from everything. Yeah, the one is not thinking, or descending down here. There's an emanation schema in which we are all ultimately emanations of it, but the one is not involved. That's not what it's about. But the other philosophers who certainly argued that the gods, even the highest deities, are very much knowledgeable about human affairs. And the Stoa argued this as well. And there's a fragment, put it really called a fragment, I suppose it's a testimony in the fourth century Christian Bishop Nimesius of Emessa. And he writes that he gives us our one witness for how it is that the, trying to explain how the Stoa conceived the mechanism of divine foreknowledge. And this is that the eternal, the universe is not eternal in Stoic thought. There's a big bang and then a big explosion at the end. That's interesting. But it's kind of eternal away because it repeats over and over again. There's a straight line, but the line bends back on itself, you know, the front gets connected to the end, because it actually just goes around and around. And the reason that they say that it's always the same, that the world can only repeat itself in the exact same way is because Plato writes in the timeus, God wanted it to be. The Demiurge wanted things to be as good as possible. And therefore, when if the world is going to repeat itself, it couldn't, there could be no variation. Variation from the plan of the Demiurge would be a variation from the best possible world, and therefore it can only be exactly the same as if the otherwise the Demiurge would have wanted a less possible world. And the gods surviving the great cataclysm that happens at the end of every cosmos. They're the only beings that get to see the beginning of the new world after the end of the last one. They've already been through the whole story so they know what's going to happen when the world repeats itself. And this is why they know future events. They've already lived it before. Oh my gosh, this is so great. I mean, it's wacky. It's wacky. I love it. But that's only that's only one late witness, the Amesias, you know, none of the stone themselves seem to say that. So my next question, I guess we talked about, you know, Pranoia, but there's also this concepts and debate within philosophical circles and antiquity about, not only does God care in terms of like the whole, but does God care about us individually as people. So I was wondering if you could touch upon that a little bit. Yeah, this is a light motif of ancient discussions of divine care and also theodicy. And if you if you read books written by modern philosophers and theologians about the problem of evil and the problem of suffering, written from a religious perspective, you find that a lot of the same questions and also the same answers that were debated and that were proposed and debated and antiquity are still being trotted out today. That was really one of the fascinating things I found, fascinating things that I found from doing this project. So, one of the answers to the question of, well, if God cares or if the gods are involved in human affairs, then why do bad things seem to happen to good people, how could God allow these terrible things to happen on earth is, Well, God or the gods seek to administer to the bigger plan. Okay, the big picture, which is a very good one, but not necessarily every little thing. That is, the gods attend to the whole. That is the universe the cosmic scale, rather than the parts. And this is a distinction that Plato makes in his dialogue called the laws, like the Republic the laws deals with political philosophy designing ideal city and Constitution. In the laws Plato also talks about a variety of other philosophical topics and these, this includes theodicy, the problem of evil, and towards one of the latter books, book nine of the dialogue. There is a discussion of whether God actually attends to little things. And the, the answer that Plato wants to give us as well. Let's not look at God as being uninvolved in things. But at the same time, we don't want to keep God to to make God completely involved in personal affairs either. So, the way that Plato tries to have it both ways here, right. That is, keep God involved in cosmic matters in some respect, but not necessarily make God responsible for every little thing is to make this distinguish to is to distinguish between care for the whole and care for the parts. The next thing you can still read in theologians today is that, well, God is not responsible for the actions of you and me, in words God responsible what happens for you and me. But that does not mean that God is not involved or that God is not responsible for the cosmos in general, the cosmos was set in motion and look at it. It is beautiful. There's regular movements in the planets of the world as a can also be a very beautiful place. In other words, God can be responsible for a lot of good things without being responsible for bad things on the microcosmic scale. This is a perspective that Plato advances and his laws, and that is taken up by virtually every subsequent Platonist. That's very important for later, the tonic philosophy. So, you know, these figures who are being influenced by these different forms of thought, and I think that there's no figure who better exemplifies that then Philo of Alexandra he's doing something similar to Plato with his, you know, God designating creation to his powers right so what does Philo do, how does he synthesize platonic and stoic ideas of divine providence. That's really interesting. You know, the, the great scholar of Philo David Runia. He, he famously said was reported to us that this is a apocryphal quote, I've never heard David say this, I've just heard people ascribe this quote to him. If we didn't have Philo, we'd have to invent him. Philo is a incredibly Hellenized Jew, who is also incredibly Jewish. He is completely committed to what he understands the religion of Israel to be, and his Judean identity. And he is also incredibly committed to the philosophy of Plato. He sees no contradiction between these two matters. And so with him what we get is a Jewish Platonist who is really Jewish and really Platonist in the first quarter, second quarter, active in the 30s and 40s of the first century CE. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but like, yeah, Philo's definitely got that super Hellenized Pidea going on with, you know, Totally, totally. He loves Pidea. He loves Pidea. And, and he also loves Moses, you know, of early, from early Christian sources in the second century. We know there must have been somebody like him running around. You know, we have, we have Jews and early Christian, the earliest Christians. We already have very Hellenized individuals who are really in the scripture, who are really into the Bible. So we, with Philo, we get somebody who's not just into Hellenistic literature, but into Plato in particular. So he's exciting. And what he does with Providence is very interesting and tells us a lot about the transformations of Providence in Roman philosophy. What Philo does is he, on the one hand, takes a lot of Platonic ideas. And he is, like I said, a committed Platonist. So he describes the creation of the world and human beings in his work on the creation of the world. Following the narrative of Genesis, Genesis one to three, but he's also using a lot of the language of the time is an episodes from the time is an interpreting Genesis. So for example, when it comes to the creation of human beings, what Philo does is he sees that there's one description of the creation of Adam and Genesis one, one 26 to 27. And then another description that's quite different, and that scholars today recognize has a totally different literary tradition. In chapters two and three, there's God saying, let us make it man in our image and likeness in Genesis one. And then there's the narrative of him making Adam out of clay and then blowing spirit or Pneuma into his face in Genesis two and the episode with Eve and the serpent in the following chapter. And so already in Philo's day, Jewish exegetes that is interpreters of Genesis, we're debating how to make sense of these two narratives that are quite different from one another, how to reconcile them with one another. If they both belong to a single revealed scripture. The book of Genesis has revealed to Moses, right. And Philo's way of going about it was to see the creation of Adam and Genesis one as being a creation of the rational part of the soul. This is the part of the Suhe that is has Pneuma the divine spiritual elements. And this is also the rational elements that's that's it's a local course. On the other hand, the creation, the molding of Adam and Eve, this describes not just the body but also the forming of the soul of Adam. And in Genesis. God often speaks to himself using the first person plural, the royal we right, let us make. Okay. Philo asks, if God was a load of the garden, who is he speaking to. And of course, the question, the answer that he gives is, well, there were other powers. He had little delegates working with him. And he calls these powers, doona mace, the clearly angels of some kind. And these are the ones who form the irrational part of the soul. Thus, God himself is not responsible for making the part of the soul that wants to eat too much cake or smoke cigarettes, or do bad self destructive things that involve desire and lead us down the path of wrong. Rather, God is only responsible for making the good part of the soul, the part of you that wants to use your head well and live well, which for Philo means to be a good Jew. So these, these powers mentioned in the creation of Adam as described by Philo when God says let us make. These are basically the young gods from Plato's time is. So he's a he's a Platonist and he uses the time is and the time is his descriptions of divine care and which agents are involved in making which parts of the world and especially human beings in a particular way. But at the same time Philo uses stoic philosophy. Very intensively. It's very important for his ethics. And it's also important for his theory of provenance, and this is because Philo is committed to the historical veracity of the Israel, the Israelites, I should say Judean scriptures as he knows them. He's reading them in Greek. Okay, in Greek translation this translation is called the Septuagint. So when he's reading the Septuagint he also reads descriptions of divine intervention miracles because the, the Hebrew Bible and its Greek translation the Septuagint are full of descriptions of miracles, right. God intervenes with to with Jacob, there's Jacob's ladder God intervenes with to help Joseph in Egypt. God intervenes so that Sarah becomes fertile after being barren so that Abraham can be get by her. Philo sees as examples of direct intervention, direct care by God on the human plane. And this is something Plato doesn't do. And when he describes this activity he explicitly keys it as divine care for particulars for particular human beings. And this is something that only stoic philosophers had previously argued in the Greek philosophical tradition. So what we see with Philo is when it suits him, he uses platonic proof texts and platonic illusions to explain what's going on in scripture. But in other cases, he prefers stoic proof texts and stoic illusions to make sense of the scriptural text. He's blending Platonism and stoicism. And what is the factor that you have in common in both cases is scripture itself. Philo is committed to the seeing scripture as something that is revealed, and that whose truth value is assured. And therefore the question is not, well, which part do we keep, which part do we throw out. It is which lens is provided, which of the lenses, the various lenses provided by Greek philosophy makes the most sense of this passage that Moses gave us, Moses and the prophets gave us. Yeah, I think what fascinates me about Philo is that he really is the culmination of all this, but he's not completely wedded to Platonism. He's not completely wedded to the stoic philosophies. He's very much, if you read him, and you take Philo for Philo in David Runia's terms, if you just let Philo be Philo Philo at the end of the day, very much is, you know, a committed Jewish intellectual using the Septuagint using the pentateuch to interpret the world. And he really is bringing this Hebrew revelatory concept and putting it together with these platonic and stoic ideas in such fascinating, fun ways. I love it. Yeah, he's an innovator. No question. I love. So I guess my final question here would be, throughout this discussion, you're seeing a lot of exchange, you know, exchange of ideas, different solutions to very difficult problems about providence, about, you know, the care of God and his intervention or lack there is in the world. So what is all this discussion tell us about the dynamic cultural exchange that's happening and dialogue between these pagans, Christians and Jews, Gnostics for lack of a better term. What's happening here, what is this telling us. So Philo is a great example of how Jews and Christians moved in the salons and educated circles of the Roman Empire, for example, he is sent during the reign of Caligula as an ambassador, representing the interests of the Christians, because Caligula has decreed that he wants to put a statue of himself in the temple, and the Holy is the Holy's. Okay. This is blasphemous as it gets, there needs to be some response from the Judean side, and this response is going to be diplomatic. And Philo is the head of that delegation sent to Rome to try to talk Caligula out of it. Luckily for Philo, by the time he gets to Rome, Caligula has already been assassinated, and a cooler Emperor Claudius has prevailed, right. But Philo doesn't just turn around and go back to Jerusalem, he stays in Rome, and there is a body of his writings that seem to engage Greek philosophy very closely using scripture as a proof text, much less often than in his other writings. And one recent theory by a great biographer of Philo, Marin Nihov, is that Philo wrote these philosophical works when he stayed in Rome in what was probably the last decade of his life. He probably went to a lot of parties and talked to a lot of very educated Romans who were interested in discussing philosophical questions with him, he knew a lot about philosophy. But they probably didn't know much about Judaism, and they certainly probably had not read the Septuagint. So he needed to discuss these topics on their terms, not referring to proof texts from the Bible. And he wrote some of these texts, so Nihov argues in that particular context. So we know that that Greeks and Christians and Jews were mingling with one another, we also see this with Justin Martyr, who in his dialogue with Truffaut, he begins this, this is a dialogue between a Jew Truffaut and Justin himself representing the new philosophy of Christ and the frame narrative for this dialogue puts Justin meeting a group of Jews at a public place. Okay, during the Bar Cochba revolt, this is, these are the revolts transpiring in the middle of the fourth decade of the second century, right. And these are refugees from those revolts from the conflict between the Judeans and the Romans down in Judea. And they meet in this public place, and Justin can recognize that he can start a philosophical conversation with this group because one of them is wearing the accoutrement of a philosophy he's got the long beard he's got a robe there's a way that he's dressed it was a subculture. And so he sees it from afar, this guy, he's going to be okay. So they get the talking philosophy, and this public space, and they talk about Providence actually divine care. Does God care for only the holes, the big picture, or for individuals, the little things where is it something else, you know, they get into this question, and this leads them naturally into a conversation about whether or not Jesus was the Messiah. And what's the early Christian movement has to say to the Judean philosophy and theology of its day. That's the dialogue. Right. What we see here is obviously a fiction is an artifice on some level on Justin's part. But it's one that he must have thought would have been convincing for his audience, namely, that some individuals total strangers walking around in the market, could spots one another and see from visual cues that they're both interested in philosophy, and then get to talking. And what do they do they say, I'm scripture to I also read the Bible. Well, have you heard about Jesus. Well, we don't recognize him. Oh, you don't. Maybe you should. And speaking as philosopher philosopher, you definitely should. And that's, that's how it gets going. Right. It also reminds me of things like Lucian of Samasada is a big favorite of ours here. And Lucian wrote passing a peregrinus and text like that true story he's very versed in these Jewish texts, it's very strange like you read true story and Lucian is Lucian and his band are going to the Isle of the blessed but then they after they're leaving they're basically going into like the apocalypse Peter or something like that and and he's taking stuff from the book of Revelation and, you know, passing a peregrinus and pseudophilus lover of lies there, you know, there's lots of references to like Hebrew would be messiahs and would be philosophers so it's very interesting you know that like these, these aren't impermeable boundaries between these people they're all living together like you said they're all in dialogue. Dr Burns, this has been fascinating. It's been an honor working people find your books. Do you have anything coming up just feel free to use this time to plug whatever you'd like. Oh, my first book, Apocalypse of the alien God, Platonism, the exile of Sethian Gnosticism is available from University of Pennsylvania Press, many online book sellers sell it. And the same is true of did God care Providence dualism and will. It's published by April. And this is a hardback. It's not cheap, but a paperback should be out by the end of this calendar year of this book. And so it will become much more affordable very soon. And I would also, I must mention this new book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Naqmari codices that I co edited with a great Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, Matthew Goff. There's a volume of papers that for the first time brings together scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls with scholars of the Gnostic peoples to exchange their knowledge and talk about what these two incredible corpora have to say to one another. This is a hardback book, but all the papers have also been published under an open access license that are available for free download from the official website. Fascinating. Love your work. Keep it coming. We hope to have you back soon and thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your knowledge. And you have a wonderful evening. Thank you so much, Jason.